


Of Colour and Confrontation

by thisiszircon



Series: The Moment of Awakening [7]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: F/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 18:15:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9001327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisiszircon/pseuds/thisiszircon
Summary: Ace finds herself unable to equivocate any longer.  The situation is made no less uncomfortable by the presence of a fainting couch.





	

**Author's Note:**

> With grateful thanks to my invaluable beta-reader and editor, [Nemo the Everbeing](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemo_the_Everbeing).

The lawn was green.  Not grass-green.  More like snooker-table-green.  Bits of it were early-eighties-fluorescent-sock-green.  It was GREEN.  With stripes.

There was a gazebo, of course.  When you had a green and manicured lawn surrounded by hedges that were trimmed to the kind of angles you could cut yourself on, and overhead a sky of unblemished powder-blue, the shiny white gazebo was probably a given.  Swathes of cloth were draped haphazardly around the structure, drifting in light breezes, as pristine as the paintwork.  A veritable Persil advert.

Ace looked around and considered that it couldn't be more dream-ified if it tried.  Then she considered that this was possibly the first time she had ever dreamed while being aware of what she was doing.

Then – of course – she looked around to see where the Professor was.

"Over here!" he called, waving.  From the gazebo.  Obviously.  No point inventing a perfect dream gazebo and not putting a Time Lord in it.  "Come on over, the champagne's nearly ready!"

Ace smiled and bounded over.  She was lighter than air.  Sensible enough; who would choose to dream themselves sluggish and heavy?

"Have a seat," the Doctor invited, as she sprang into the airy shelter.  He was busy on the far side, his back to her, attending to something that required him to stoop.

Ace examined their surroundings.  There was a rocking chair, a fainting couch and a leopard-skin sofa, all angled around a low table laid out with cutlery, crockery and crystal glasses.

"Where?" she asked.

"You choose.  It's your dream."

Which was true.  She waved her hand derisively at the sofa.  "We're not making a seventies porn flick," she said.

"We're not?" the Doctor asked.  He turned to her, and his seventies porn moustache snuffled comically, making her laugh, before he sneezed it away.  "I'll get rid of the pizza boxes, then."

Ace nodded at the sense of this and turned back to the furnishings.  The sofa was gone.  She eyed the rocking chair critically.

"No arms," she observed.

"They'd get in the way of your legs," the Time Lord agreed.  "Unless you want to do it the other way round.  But I think we're past the faceless thing now."

"Probably right," Ace said.  She looked at the fainting couch.  She wondered when her brain had even acquired the nomenclature for a 'fainting couch'.  It was narrow, firmly stuffed and upholstered in a tapestry finish, with an arm at only one end and a tapered bit at the other.  "Bit formal."

"Uncomfortable, too."

"How about we just have cushions?"

"Your dream."

Ace looked hard at the space around the table, and the furniture vanished to be replaced by copious numbers of heaped cushions.

There was a ding.  It sounded like a microwave.  Curiosity made her wander over to see what the Doctor was doing.  An old-fashioned television stood beside him, to waist height, and he'd apparently been fiddling with the dials.  As she watched, he hit the on-off switch and the screen popped open like a door.  Within the body of the television two bottles stood on a tabletop, each only three inches high.  Below them read the legend: _'Le Fizz – when you're in the mood for l'amour.'_   It was, she realised, the final frames of a commercial.

As the Doctor reached inside, his hand got smaller and smaller until he brushed the letters of the legend aside into a jumbled heap and grasped a bottle.  He drew it out through the open screen, and it grew to become a standard size.

"Staring at your hands," Ace said, sighing as she caught her own obsessive behaviour.

"Just try not to drool on the cushions."

"Hark at Mr God's-Gift!"

"Yes, yes, all right, I think you've demonstrated that you aren't winsome – there's no need to insult me.  Would you like some champagne?"

"Course I would."

"Are you sure?  I mean, right now, right in this moment – this dream moment – is your mind truly set on drinking a glass of champagne?"  His eyes widened briefly, suggestively.  "Or are you thinking of other pursuits?"

There was a moment of silence as they looked at each other.  The Doctor was still holding the bottle – which was now, with admirable attention to detail, condensing humidity out of the summery dream air – and Ace was wondering when exactly it was that her fantasies had gone from 'Take me, Time Lord,' to 'Oh, Lord Ponsonby, I seem to have dropped my kerchief in your general direction.'

"What bollocks this is," Ace said.

"I wasn't going to mention."

"Is my head really stuffed with this kind of nonsense?"

"Everything needs a context."

"You and me, Professor.  We don't need anything else."

"Then why are you currently sleeping alone?"

"Don't distract me.  This is dreaming."

"I'm only asking the questions you want to ask yourself."

Ace breathed deep.  "And I'm choosing not to answer."

"Doesn't seem like a very productive dream, then."

"The dream's fine.  I'm in control, and I can do the things here that I can't out there.  So I say bollocks to this gazebo, let's get naked."

The Doctor grinned at her, mischievous and twinkling.  He threw his bottle of Le Fizz over his shoulder and then made Scooby Doo-ripples with his hands.  Moments later, when the blurring dissipated, he stood there unclothed.  Ace glanced down at herself.  Whatever it was she'd been wearing was gone too.  Around them, the television and the cushions and the gazebo were gone.  They stood in the middle of a lush greener-than-green field under a powder-blue sky.

She stepped closer and lifted a hand.  With one finger, she trailed a path down the Doctor's chest.

"Tell me you want to make love with me," she murmured.

"What difference would that make?"

"I just want to hear it.  In your voice.  Even if it isn't real."

"How do you know it isn't real?"

"Oy!  Dream-concubine!  Stop being so bloody contrary."

"Sorry.  I want to make love with you.  How's that?"

Ace arched a brow and glanced down.  The words were not being undermined by any lack of physical enthusiasm.  She squeezed her thighs together.

Then she moved in to press her chest to the Doctor's.  His arms surrounded her and his mouth fell to her shoulder.  She sighed with the embrace and his sensuous kisses.

"I am so bollocksed," she said in resignation.

"Only when you wake up," he murmured into her skin.

"I'll be tearing my hair out!"

"I know.  Asking yourself why you made this happen when you were the one in control."

"Can't exactly make excuses for this one," she agreed.

"Perhaps it's time."

"Perhaps.  At least I didn't wilt."

He chuckled against her shoulder.  "But you still suspect that, in certain circumstances, wilting might be fun."

"Hmm."  She frowned, pulled back a little and the Doctor's head came up lazily to look at her.  "You're my subconscious, right?"

"Effectively.  But let's not spoil things."

"Just a second.  Is there something wrong with me?"

"Yes."

"What, then?"

He shrugged.  "You're in love with an alien who might be asexual."

"I mean apart from that."

"You haven't gone bonkers, if that's what you mean."

Ace felt a chill.  "The Professor wouldn't say 'bonkers'."  She pulled away from the naked Time Lord and sat down on the sun-warmed grass.  "Oh, god.  I am completely and utterly screwed."

"Not yet, you aren't."

"Oh shut up.  It's no fun when I know it isn't really you."

"Sorry."

Ace flopped back and closed her eyes.  "What do I do?" she whispered.

It was her own voice that answered her, though she didn't think she spoke.

"You bloody well sort it out, one way or another.  Right?"

She blinked open her eyes, looking around for herself, but–

~~~

There was no one there in her darkened bedroom.

Ace breathed, grounding herself in non-dream reality.  There was still a trace of wood-smoke in the usually sterile TARDIS air, thanks to the clothes she had discarded in the corner before she'd showered.  The events on Colonis were only distant by a handful of hours, as yet.

"Perfect," she said.  "Top fucking notch."

This was, she decided, an appalling time for her brain to get unequivocal about the Doctor.  With everything else the two of them had gone through of late, the last thing they needed was a relationship-threatening complication.

She lay awake for an hour after that, wistfully recalling months filled with ambiguity and uncertainty and all those twisting, turning, contrived justifications in the aftermath of other dreams.

Simpler, happier times.

~~~~~~


End file.
